Our MyST Blogsite generates highly qualified leads compared to other venues of online lead generation. One of the primary reasons is we have a trust factor, which we built (and continue to build) by providing dependable and accurate information through the blogsite. As a result, actions are more meaningful for business and the customer."
I’d much rather eliminate blog-crawling spambots than track down and prosecute individuals that use weblogs to make false or misleading claims about their business.
Last week the UK-based Times Online ran a story on new regulations in the EU that could lead to criminal prosecution of businesses which write fake blog entries or create whole wesbites purporting to be from customers. This week, Dave Taylor writes about the implications for bloggers and the general unenforceability of such a law.
While these regulations certainly go too far and should probably be removed from the books, it would really be nice if there was a way to enforce laws prohibiting comment spam and referral spam in weblogs when performed by automated, web-crawling robots.
In the case of comment spam, these robots traverse the blogosphere automatically posting comments that refer to the spammer’s website. The hope is that with hundreds of thousands of links scattered throughout the Internet, search engine ranking of the spammer’s site goes up. In addition, a certain percentage of the links (even if small) will result in direct click-throughs.
Referral spam works similarly. Since blogsites record visiting URLs, referral spammers visit post after post in order to get their site recorded. If these records are made public, for any reason, the spammer can again realize an increase in traffic.
Weblog spam causes numerous problems. It overloads servers, skews site traffic data, can be embarrassing to a weblog owner, and is certainly annoying when irrelevant and sometimes offensive references to sites promoting drugs, gambling, pornography and so on, pop up in a post.
Two years ago, blog spammers brought down some of our blogsites. Since then, MyST has developed sophisticated security algorithms which we internally refer to as SlimeGate. While SlimeGate now keeps all MyST blogsites free from these kinds of problems, it would be nice to see some of these guys shut down for good.
I spoke with a group of bloggers in Phoenix recently. What I found is that very few had any business from their blogs despite a lot of effort. I have 5 closings and 7 active buyers directly from [our MyST blogsite] in 2008. I know because I ask. One person told me they have been reading my blog for almost a year before they called me to buy a property."
